Immigrants
The EU has always been an elite project to decide matters without being accountable to the people in any way

It is becoming increasingly clear why immigration is so important to the EU elites: because they see the mass movement of people essentially as a weapon against national sovereignty. Their mass-migration project of recent years hasn't been a humane endeavour to improve the lives of foreign peoples; it has been about further erasing borders, using migrant flows effectively as a tool to push the EU oligarchy's post-nation agenda.

This is why, ahead of this week's EU summit on the migrant crisis, Angela Merkel said the migrant question is central to the EU's 'value system' and to its celebration of 'multilateralism'. In short, migrant flows make real the EU's claim to be a post-sovereignty entity. This is also why Brussels is upping the ante against Hungary - because Hungary's refusal to take in certain migrants represents an intolerable assertion of national independence against EU pressure.

And this is why EU officials and their media cheerleaders rail against ordinary people who question mass migration or argue that it should be a democratic issue: because this undermines the EU project of removing key political questions from the pesky realm of national democracy. They have weaponised immigration and then they wonder why so many Europeans are concerned about immigration. It isn't because they're xenophobic, but because they know that among the political elites being 'pro-migrant' is now code for being anti-democratic.